Jitterbit, founded in 2004, offers integration solutions to enterprises ever since they released their first integration product in 2006. Last week, they announced the support for Jitterbit on Amazon EC2. Basically, their users can now pick up the Jitterbit AMI and run the integration platform on Amazon Web Services. With this low cost option, they are targeting the low end enterprise market.

Jitterbit, the company and their platform

Jitterbit is an Oakland based integration services company, took the open source approach to enterprise level integration in a market crowded with proprietary vendors. Released under a amended version of Mozilla license called Jitterbit Public License, Jitterbit makes money using the subscription model like many other open source companies. Their integration solutions were designed to connect legacy systems, enterprise applications and data in a seamless manner without much overhead.

Jitterbit’s focus has evolved over four stages right now. They first focused to make the integration process with Jitterbit very simple so that a technical business analyst will be able to do the integration work by himself/herself. A perfect example is the story of a Florida based company that provides pharmacy benefit management services in worker’s compensation cases, by name AWPRx. Forbes ran a story about how their CEO could get rid of developers who were burdening their IT and then replace them with Jitterbit and a leaner workforce.

One way to avoid doing that is to take advantage of new hosted applications, like Salesforce.com or Zoho, for sales and customer service. These programs put a lot of emphasis on easy-to-use tools for customizing forms and databases. So although it’s possible to do some more heavy-duty programming to customize the software, often it’s not necessary.

Still, AWPRx’s business is complex, requiring the automated exchange of data with other applications and with other businesses, such as insurance companies and drug companies. That goes beyond what the likes of Salesforce can do on its own.

AWPRx has been able to manage a lot of the additional integration and customization with software from Jitterbit.

Their second focus was on reusability. They realized that writing code for every single application is a complete wastage of resources and put reusability of code as a central focus of their integration platform. Their third focus was on manageability. Their fourth stage, which was announced yesterday, is support for cloud based integration.

Jitterbit Enterprise Cloud Edition

Jitterbit enterprise cloud edition, announced last week, is a result of their realization that enterprises are adopting cloud computing in large numbers. Especially, the low end of enterprise market is hugely attracted by the cost effectiveness of cloud based solution. By offering the AMI version of Jitterbit platform for a very low cost (only $799 per month for unlimited users). Their cloud edition has all the features of their existing Jitterbit enterprise edition plus few other features

I asked Ilan Sehayek, CTO of Jitterbit about the security of data transmission as it leaves the firewall and he told me that they support connections over VPN. I also asked him if he can convince big enterprises to put their data on public clouds. He told me that the Fortune 100 type of companies will not opt for Jitterbit Cloud edition and they will care only about their On-Premise offerings. He told me that their focus with the cloud edition is on smaller enterprises like AWPRx who don’t have any inhibitions to using clouds. He pointed out that in the AWPRx case, they already have most of their data on the cloud and an integration solution like the Jitterbit Cloud Edition is well suited for them.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.